Daily news about using open source R for big data analysis, predictive modeling, data science, and visualization since 2008

May 11, 2012

Mariano Rivera’s baseball prowess, illustrated with R

Kevin Quealy, graphics editor at the New York Times, has published another fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how the Times creates data visualizations for print and online. In his latest post, he looks at how a visualization of the Yankee's Mariano Rivera performance compared to other Major League Baseball pitchers was created. (Detail below, click for the full image.)

The infographic began its life as a hand-drawn sketch, that begat a line-chart created using R (based on data scraped from the Web). The R chart was was then cleaned up and annotated using Adobe Illustrator for publication. One interesting detail of the process: the source R graph is deliberately created using garish colours (purples, greens, etc.) to make the color-selection process easier in Illustrator.